1. Field
The invention disclosed and claimed herein relates generally to a method associated with the governance for a service oriented architecture (SOA), and more specifically relates to generating, monitoring and managing events that affect respective components of a configuration of SOA governance components or products.
2. Description of the Related Art
As is known by those of skill in the art, SOA is generally directed to the development of systems that typically group functionality around multiple business processes or the like, in order to provide configurations of interoperable services. SOA infrastructure enables different applications to exchange data with one another, where the applications can pertain to different processes, and respective functions of the SOA are separated into distinct units or services. Various developers and vendors make a number of different services available over a network. Users are thus enabled to access a variety of services, and to combine them together in coordinated relationships. Examples of services associated with SOAs include very practical activities, such as online ordering of airline tickets and hotel reservations.
SOA governance pertains to a set of tasks, processes, or activities that are put in place to exercise control over the respective services of an SOA. A stream of such SOA tasks or processes can be referred to as governance flow. Generally, the focus of governance is to deploy and use the SOA to achieve goals and objectives of a particular business entity or other SOA user. However, different users will typically have different business requirements, growing out of factors such as their individual IT challenges, existing technologies, and users in corporate cultures. They will also have different SOA requirements, such as SOA maturity, entry points, and life cycle.
The SOA governance technology market at present includes a wide variety of products that are targeted toward different users. The various types of SOA governance products are needed, in order to address different communities of users and to satisfy requirements in different stages of SOA life cycle and governance. Examples of such products or components include, without limitation, run-time service registries and repositories that manage service systems of record; development-time asset management systems; and information systems that keep track of infrastructure configuration items, applications and service configurations. Products or components such as these address different aspects of service life cycle and SOA governance.
The governance or governance flow for an SOA generally comprises a configuration of multiple SOA governance components, such as those referred to above, which are integrated or interconnected in a particular way. However, these SOA components are typically capable only of limited tool specific and point-to-point integration with other SOA governance solutions or components. As a result, when an organization needs to add a new or additional SOA governance product, the user of the SOA can be faced with a tedious and complex task. Typically, such new product will have to interact with and be integrated to each of the SOA governance components that are already in the configuration. Accordingly, integration of the new product tends to become exponentially complicated.
Moreover, in addition to adding a new SOA governance product or component, the service of a component that is already included in the configuration can be changed to a different service state or version. A change of this type can also be an event that affects or impacts other components of the SOA governance configuration. Accordingly, managing service events across the SOA governance components can be extremely complicated.